Leo McKinstry

Leo McKinstry is a British journalist and author

Stepping into the bloodbath of Iraq would be madness

NOT since Jimmy Savile held court as a children’s TV presenter in the 1970s has there been a more inappropriate, surreal public appointment than Tony Blair’s as the United Nations’ peace envoy to the Middle East.

His deranged vanity, warmongering dogma and contempt for national sovereignty have plunged the region into new levels of blood-soaked conflict.

With his shameful record of fuelling international instability and extremism he should retreat into humiliated silence instead of jetting around as some kind of perma-tanned elder statesman.

The deepening crisis in Iraq is a monument to his spectacular folly. As the Sunni insurgents of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Al Sham terror organisation (Isis) seize swathes of the country and threaten Baghdad, Blair cannot evade his responsibility as a chief architect of the disaster.

It was his illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that drove the country into civil war and promoted the rise of jihadists bent on creating a medieval-style caliphate across the Middle East.

Indeed Isis, which numbers at least 12,000 fanatical warriors, was created from the Al Qaeda network in Iraq.

In 2011 Blair’s former henchman Alastair Campbell declared with typical bombast: “Britain should be really proud of the role we played in Iraq, from what it was to what it is becoming.”

Those words are as hollow as Campbell’s notorious assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which formed the pretext for the reckless invasion in 2003.

Pay no heed to the rantings of Blair

Blair has not shown the slightest contrition for the disaster he precipitated. The opposite is true. Yesterday, in a performance that showed he has learnt nothing from history, he demanded not only further Western intervention in Iraq but air strikes against President Assad’s regime in Syria.

We should not pay any heed to these ravings. To step into this bloodbath again would be to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of a decade ago.

If intervention led to more violence then why should it be any different this time? The fight against the Sunni insurgency has no more to do with direct national interests than the overthrow of Saddam’s dictatorship.

It is outrageous to treat the lives of the British armed forces as playthings of politicians’ self-importance.

The case for intervention is riddled with contradictions. On one hand the warmongers argue we should intervene in Syria on behalf of the Sunni jihadists against the Alawiteled government of Assad.

On the other we are told we should intervene in Iraq on behalf of the sovereign, Shia-led government against Sunni jihadists. That absurdity shows the madness of meddling in other countries’ affairs.

In 1922, when coalition leader Lloyd George was itching to go to war against Turkey, Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law told him: “We cannot act as the policeman of the world.”

That remark was made when the British empire was at its strongest. How much more rational would that attitude be today when we no longer have an empire and have been through massive defence cuts.

We should concentrate on our nation’s needs rather than posturing on the global stage. Even after Blair’s misguided bellicosity the creed of progressive internationalism holds sway in our political class.

Blair’s wars have been followed by David Cameron’s role in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, his foolish cheerleading for the misnamed Arab Spring and his attempt to embroil us in the cesspit of Syria on the side of Islamist rebels, a move that was fortunately stopped by a vote in Parliament.

But the coalition, fully backed by Labour, has found another outlet for this interventionist impulse through the £11billion-a-year international aid budget.

For all the rhetoric about compassion the reality is this aid has meant that vast sums of British taxpayers’ money are being squandered on corruption and abuses abroad when the Government is imposing austerity at home.

The common justification for these globalist antics is that they help prevent the incidence of extremism at home. By “draining the swamp” through cash and wars we will be safer in Britain, goes the argument. That is nonsense.

If politicians were serious about protecting the public and maintaining our integrity then they would tighten our borders, uphold our British identity, kick out foreign criminals and extremists, demand loyalty from migrants and limit the award of citizenship.

As it is, the political elite, which sends our troops to die in Iraq and Afghanistan, supposedly in the fight against global jihadism, wilfully allows Islamic bigotry, intolerance and alien practices to flourish here.

Over the past decade more than 500,000 migrants have settled here every year, the majority from Asia and Africa, while the doctrine of multiculturalism has meant there is no official drive to integrate newcomers.

So we end up with the nightmare of Muslim zealots organising the takeover of schools, promoting sharia law and importing institutionalised misogyny such as forced marriage.

Moreover the Human Rights Act means that our legal system is utterly supine in the face of extremists. What we need is a political class that in place of this destructive enthusiasm for globalisation puts Britain first.